Yesterday I reported on it appearing the 295.40 NVIDIA Linux driver effectively fell off a cliff with a range of performance regressions, stability issues, and other problems. This issue has been confirmed by NVIDIA and they're working to address the situation.

While the NVIDIA 295.40 Linux graphics driver closes a high-risk security vulnerability, there's many reports coming in that the proprietary driver's performance has effectively fallen off a cliff and also caused stability issues.

NVIDIA's Linux team this morning announced the immediate release of the 295.40 Linux driver. There aren't many changes for this release compared to the recent 295.33 driver release, but it does address a high-risk security vulnerability.

Shinpei Kato, the developer that last year at XDC2011 Chicago presented TimeGraph as an open-source GPU Linux command scheduler and PathScale's GPGPU run-time, has something new to share. Shinpei's latest project is Gdev, which comes down to being an open-source CUDA implementation that's competitive to NVIDIA's proprietary stack.

On the same-day as releasing the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 as the first GeForce graphics card based upon the new Kepler architecture, there's a binary driver update from NVIDIA that ushers in the official Kepler Linux support. There's also more surprising news out of the reverse-engineering Nouveau camp, on top of their surprises earlier today.

NVIDIA has finally introduced their first Kepler-based graphics card: the GeForce GTX 680. The new Kepler graphics architecture is an exciting successor to Fermi, but how well does this new graphics processor work under Linux? Here's a glimpse in what to expect for the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 600 series on Linux.

Here are the first set of Phoronix.com benchmarks of the quad-core NVIDIA Tegra 3. Needless to say, four Cortex-A9s combined with NVIDIA graphics leads to a fairly fast ARMv7 experience when running Ubuntu Linux.

NVIDIA will be joining the Linux Foundation, per an announcement coming out in the morning. But for open-source Linux fans, will this be a reason to rejoice about NVIDIA potentially moving forward with open-source drivers? Don't break out the champagne quite yet.

There's some resurrected hope for the kernel symbols of the DMA-BUF buffer sharing mechanism to be not restricted to only GPL drivers, which started off as a request by NVIDIA. This could lead to better NVIDIA Optimus support under Linux, among other benefits.

Back in December there was an announcement from NVIDIA that they would open-source their CUDA compiler based upon the LLVM back-end. NVIDIA today released their new CUDA implementation that's based upon LLVM. Besides being open-source, which will allow it to be ported to new (non-NVIDIA) architectures/hardware, there's also a measurable speed boost in the switch over to LLVM.

A NVIDIA Linux engineer is trying to work on code that could lead to official Optimus support under Linux, but there's a catch... And it falls outside of NVIDIA Corp as the fate of this multi-GPU notebook feature could now fall with the Linux kernel developers.

It was just in August that NVIDIA was pushing out driver betas for their Linux/Solaris/FreeBSD 285.xx series, but now that the series is stable, they have moved onto the 290.xx series. On Friday NVIDIA released the 290.03 Linux driver beta.

NVIDIA has created a new branch of their proprietary Linux graphics driver. This new driver is for the "long-lived" series. The purpose of this series is to provide just bug-fixes and other minor updates for non-legacy hardware. In other words, like their legacy drivers where they just receive minor updates, but for those just wanting these fixes for newer hardware while not exposing any new functionality.

Following a proposal earlier this summer by NVIDIA to extend the RandR protocol, they have now produced a patch for the X.Org Server that adds border property support to the RandR (Resize and Rotate) extension.

While some NVIDIA Linux developers are up here in Vancouver for LinuxCon (met some friendly and informative NVIDIA engineers at the Linux Foundation gala last night), the NVIDIA Linux desktop team back in Santa Clara has put out the first 285.xx Linux driver series beta now that the 280 driver was made official earlier in the month.

On the ATI/AMD Radeon side, when your hardware is no longer supported by the mainline Catalyst driver (e.g. right now all Radeon X1000 [R500] GPUs and older), you're left to use just the open-source driver stack, which obviously works quite well for many consumers on new and old hardware. AMD doesn't update their legacy Catalyst support for this older hardware in terms of bug-fixes and support for new X.Org / Linux releases. NVIDIA though, however, is continuing to support their vintage hardware via legacy Linux driver updates. This week they've released four new drivers.

Earlier this month NVIDIA released the first 280 series Linux driver with initial support for X.Org Server 1.11, among other changes. Before ending out last week, NVIDIA's engineers released another 280 beta Linux driver.

While NVIDIA's proprietary driver for their GeForce/Quadro hardware still lacks RandR 1.2+ support (that will hopefully change when RandR 1.4 is finally out), NVIDIA has proposed extending RandR to support over-scan compensation. This support isn't for their mainline NVIDIA binary driver but rather their TEGRA Linux driver.

While NVIDIA yesterday released a new Linux driver, it was quick to be pointed out in our forums that NVIDIA Optimus Technology still is not officially supported under Linux. But that's not all that's missing from their proprietary driver.

While NVIDIA is already in the middle of working on the 280 driver series and there's been a public beta of that, this Friday morning NVIDIA has released a new 275.xx stable release. While this release is still tagged in the 275 series, it does contain a few worthwhile fixes and new hardware enablement.

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